1. No category

Popular Music (2006) Volume 25/2. Copyright © 2006 Cambridge University Press, pp. 185–200
doi:10.1017/S0261143006000857 Printed in the United Kingdom
Kind of Blue and the economy of
modal jazz
S A MU E L B A R R E T T
Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, 11 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP
E-mail: sjb59@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots in the blues of the best-selling
jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less
problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice. The case that the blues underpins
the modal language of the album is made through reconsideration of the claims made for
compositional features of individual tracks. Recognition of the transformed blues language that
lies at the heart of the album places questions of its significance on a new footing, opening up the
mix of musical languages on the album to interpretation within the context of integrationist ideals
of the late 1950s. A critical reading of the album against this backdrop leads to the suggestion that
the ongoing commercial success of the album can be partly attributed to a retention of
integrationist ideals that masks the reality of persistent inequalities in race relations.
On its latest cover, Kind of Blue is pronounced ‘perhaps the most influential and best
selling jazz album of all time’. The sales figures for the album support at least the
second part of this claim: latest estimates provided by Sony Music put total sales at
about 4.5–5 million units, with the majority being sold during the last six years – only
the record sales of Louis Armstrong are thought to be remotely comparable among
recognised jazz artists.1 As for ‘influence’, jazz historians have attributed the seminal
status of the album to its exploration of innovative modal techniques as subsequently
used in a wide variety of popular music. The relation between the album’s musical
techniques and its popular reception, however, has never been directly addressed. As
a result, most critics have taken the album’s own promotional material at face value in
attempting to explain its success, i.e. the formal characteristics of the tracks as
explained in the liner notes by Bill Evans have been taken as the defining feature of the
album:
‘So What’ is a simple figure based on 16 measures of one scale, 8 of another and 8 more of the
first . . . ‘All Blues’ is a 6/8 12-measure blues form that produces its mood through only a few
modal changes and Miles Davis’ free melodic conception. ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is a series of five
scales, each to be played as long as the soloist wishes until he has completed the series.
For all the interest of Evans’ remarks, their status as liner notes needs to be
remembered. Not only are his comments sometimes misleading – Evans famously
overstates the freedom afforded the players and the spontaneity of the sessions2 – but
they are not the only statement about the music on the album. The most prominent
comment about the album’s orientation is made by its title – ‘kind of Blue’(s). To take
Miles Davis’s verbal play as a cue to understanding the music brings not only an
altered technical perspective but an altered critical one, for if ever a genre was
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inseparable from social and political circumstance it was (and is) the blues. The title of
the album accordingly points away from conventional considerations of the rise of
‘modal’ jazz to the wider rise to popularity of blues idioms in the 1950s.
The implications of this proposed shift in focus can most readily be appreciated
by considering the commonly cited predecessors of Kind of Blue. Four members of the
sextet that recorded Kind of Blue in 1959 had the previous year recorded Milestones
(Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane and Paul Chambers). The difference between the two albums is striking: Milestones is indebted to hard bop, with its
fast speeds, angular phrases and driving rhythms; Kind of Blue is more relaxed,
spacious, even ‘cool’. Despite these stylistic differences, the two albums are closely
wedded together in jazz histories: the title track of Milestones is often cited as the
earliest fully-fledged example of modal jazz, supposedly based on only two scales.3
What is overlooked in this narrative is that both Milestones and Kind of Blue are heavily
blues based: four of the six tracks on the former are blues numbers (‘Dr. Jackle’, ‘Sid’s
Ahead’, ‘Two Bass Hit’ and ‘Straight, No Chaser’), two out of five on the latter (‘All
Blues’ and ‘Freddie Freeloader’). The extent to which modal jazz is rooted in the blues
is underlined by the fact that the title track of Milestones, the often hailed ‘first example
of modal jazz’, is characterised by its blues figuration, with its rising and falling
between chordal tones over a static harmony (see Example 1.1). This same figuration
was then used as the groove on ‘All Blues’ on Kind of Blue (see Example 1.2).
If Kind of Blue is heard in the light of blues idioms of the late 1950s more
generally, then other striking parallels begin to emerge. In 1958, Art Blakey and the Jazz
Messengers recorded the album Moanin’, widely regarded as a landmark album in its
combination of hard bop with a ‘down home’ blues style. The title track is marked by
a call-and-response theme whose two-bar structure, overall rhythmic profile, and
‘Amen’ cadence are all echoed in the theme of ‘So What’ (see Examples 2.1 and 2.2).
For all the continuity that can be demonstrated between Milestones, hard bop and
Kind of Blue, the sense of a fundamental shift in overall feel or attitude remains – a shift
from a hard bop sound, with all its African-American resonance, to a softer, cooler
sound, characterised in part by Bill Evans’ classical tone and impressionist voicings.
Put this way, the implications of the stylistic shift with respect to attitudes towards
racial integration cannot be ignored. The presence of a white man, Bill Evans, in the
most high profile jazz band at the time was offensive to some African-Americans, and
accusations that Evans ‘didn’t play hard enough and fast enough’, as epitomised by
his playing on Kind of Blue, soon followed.4
In seeking a more nuanced account of both the musical techniques and social
resonance of Kind of Blue, parallels between blues transformations and social attitudes
will be explored here. The various transformations of the blues in the later 1950s have
long been interpreted against the backdrop of shifting race relations, with extremes
marked out by on the one hand the assimilation of blues idioms in the whitedominated early rock and roll, and on the other the leanings of rhythm and blues and
incipient soul music towards a separately defined black identity.5 The restrained
mixing of styles on Kind of Blue, by contrast, points to the aspirations of the integrationist movement. Although integration had been discussed among liberal elites
since the mid-1930s,6 movement towards integration only assumed nationwide
prominence in the wake of the overturning of ‘separate but equal’ schooling in 1954
(Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka), and the beginnings of non-violent resistance in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955.7 The dignified restraint of Kind of Blue
points to a use of the blues that is closer in tone to integrationist ideals than any
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Example 1.1. Opening of Milestones.
separatist tendencies; whether it is open to the same criticisms as the integrationist
movement, namely that equality achieved de iure masked ongoing de facto
inequalities, remains to be seen.
I. Modal means
Two tracks on Kind of Blue are commonly regarded as quintessential examples
of modal jazz: ‘So What’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’. According to most textbook
definitions, ‘So What’ is based on two Dorian scales (on D and EX) arranged in a
standard AABA pattern, and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is an extended improvisation based
on a series of five scales. The two blues tracks on the album, ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and
‘All Blues’, cause more disagreement: according to Mark Gridley ‘All Blues’ has ‘a
modal approach to harmony’,8 while for Ekkehard Jost both blues tracks ‘bear the
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Example 1.2. Opening of All Blues (after 4 bars of vamp).
stamp of modal playing’;9 Frank Tirro, on the other hand, ignores both blues tracks in
discussing modal jazz,10 while James Lincoln Collier claims that all the pieces on Kind
of Blue are modal.11 The problem hinges on the ambiguity of the term ‘modal’, which
is defined in a number of different ways extending from improvisation based (however loosely) on selected scales, to playing over static harmonic backgrounds, to any
harmonic organisation that is not straightforwardly diatonic.
To consider modality in jazz through the lens of the blues provides a partial
solution to this problem, for the blues encompasses all the various qualities ascribed to
‘modal jazz’. The primarily melodic focus of the blues, which is often limited to a
particular scale (such as the pentatonic in much Delta blues), acts as a precedent for
the scales provided to the soloists as bases for improvisation in modal jazz. Also, the
way a limited number of chords can serve as a loose and not necessarily metrically
fixed support for the voice in blues, finds its counterpart in the ‘vamps’ used in modal
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Example 2.1. Moanin’, 2-bar theme.
Example 2.2. So What, 2-bar theme.
jazz. The harmonic language of the blues is also not necessarily diatonic, since the
tendency to treat the tonic chord as a dominant seventh sets up an ongoing cycle with
a weakened sense of any home key. To view Kind of Blue against this background
opens up a series of questions about individual tracks, such as why certain scales and
not others were chosen on ‘So What’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’, why an ostensibly
diatonic track such as ‘Blue in Green’ sounds just as ‘modal’ as these tracks, and why
the whole album feels like one consistent musical language. In search of answers to
these questions, the three tracks that do not explicitly draw on the blues will be
considered in detail, beginning with the most controversial.
‘Flamenco Sketches’
Previous attempts to describe the musical design of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ have
examined either scalar or chordal organisation. Among writers who have turned to
scales, loosely termed modes, the five scales used on ‘Flamenco Sketches’ have been
the subject of some disagreement.12 Ashley Kahn, in his recent study of the making of
Kind of Blue brought both clarity and confusion to the matter by enlarging a session
photograph showing Cannonball Adderley’s chart for ‘Flamenco Sketches’.13 Alongside the photograph, Kahn listed not the scales on the chart, but the scales that Davis
used in his solos since, of the soloists, only Davis plays what might be termed pure
‘modal’ scales (for a transcription of the scales on Adderley’s chart alongside Kahn’s
list, see Example 3).
There are several discrepancies between Kahn’s list of scales and Adderley’s
chart. A clue to the reason why some of the discrepancies might have arisen lies in
Evans’ indication at the top of chart, ‘Play in [the] sound of these scales’, implying that
the listed scales served simply as cues to creating overall sonorities. Far from being
confronted with an unusual demand to improvise simply on scales, it seems that
Adderley was given a set of pitches that could be understood as familiar sonorities.
At the second segment, Adderley was given EX Dorian, which could easily be
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Example 3. Modal scales in ‘Flamenco Sketches’. The notes in brackets are conjectural since they cannot
be seen clearly on the picture of the chart provided by Kahn. An apparent error in Kahn’s list occurs
at the fifth segment, where Davis plays prominent E naturals rather than E flats, i.e. he selects pitches
from a G Dorian rather than G Aeolian set. The reconstruction of this fifth scale on Adderley’s chart
follows conventional practice in representing Davis’s scale selection. At the fourth segment, Kahn gives
the conventional D Phrygian, since Davis plays notes exclusively from a D Phrygian scale, but
underneath his solo Evans plays alternating D major and E flat chords as well as introducing C
naturals. The scale that encompasses Evans’ note selection is therefore precisely the one that Adderley
had in front of him: D, EX, FY, G, A, BX, C. At the second segment, Kahn gives the usual AX
Mixolydian, but Adderley had EX Dorian in front of him. Here it would seem that the commonly cited
scale is a better representation of what was played than the chart, for although there is no difference in
pitch content between EX Dorian and AX Mixolydian, the fact that Paul Chambers repeatedly plays 5–1
onto AX suggests that the scale is more accurately described as AX Mixolydian.
understood as EX minor, and at the fourth segment the slurs added to Adderley’s chart
indicate that two major triads a minor second apart (as played by Evans) were at the
front of his mind.14 What Adderley read from the chart was therefore two major scales
(C and BX), two minor scales (EX and G) and one exotic scale to which slurs were
added to clarify an internal structure of two major triads.
Any suggestion that the five scales of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ were treated as
familiar major and minor sonorities lends weight to Barry Kernfeld’s suggestion that
this track is built not on modal scales, but a series of chordal vamps.15 Evans’
two-chord oscillations over V–I roots in the first three segments can easily be understood as a vamp structure,16 and a case can even be made for an overall tonal
organisation to the track (see Example 4). There are, however, difficulties in describing the sonorities explored in ‘Flamenco Sketches’ in such functional terms. Most
notably, the track ends not on C major but on G minor, and each soloist cadences in the
G minor section rather than continuing to Cmaj7 as both the end and the beginning of
the cycle. Even if the sequence were regarded as starting on chord IV of G minor, this
would not explain why the final Gmin9 serves as a closing point and Cmaj7 sounds as
a new beginning each time around the sequence.
A simpler way to hear ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is as an elaboration of a single and
static blues sonority. Key to this consideration is the fact that all the roots of the
harmonies on ‘Flamenco Sketches’ are drawn from a single C Aeolian scale, i.e. C, D,
EX, F, G, AX, BX. That the harmonies of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ can be associated through
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Example 4. Kernfeld’s proposed harmonic progression for ‘Flamenco Sketches’. The fourth (‘Flamenco’) segment can be heard as an altered dominant seventh chord since the juxtaposition of F sharps
in the backing with front line F naturals transforms the overall sonority into a dominant seventh on
D with an added flattened ninth (EX), sharpened ninth (F natural), and a flattened thirteenth (BX).
It follows that the final two scales in the cycle can be considered a cadential II–Vmin in preparation for
I at the beginning of the new cycle, which acts as both a point of arrival and departure. As for the earlier
chords in the sequence, Kernfeld argues that the XVI at the second segment operates as a tritone
substitution for II (even though D natural is not used in the second segment scale), which is then only
interrupted by XVII before returning to II. Kernfeld therefore argues that the whole progression works
as an interrupted and heavily inflected II–Vmin–I.
a C Aeolian scale is not as arbitrary as it might first appear, for the practice became a
common procedure in rock music.17 The principle is that of building harmonies on a
scale over which the blues can be played, and it is this exploration of local colours
within an overall blues sonority that binds together ‘Flamenco Sketches’. Moreover, it
is not just that the roots of the harmonies are drawn from a scale with flattened third,
sixth and seventh, but that the entire sound world is derived from the principle
explored in much blues of introducing flattened alterations or ‘blue notes’ against a
diatonic major scale. On ‘Flamenco Sketches’, starting from an initial white note
chord-scale of C major, all subsequent chord-scales lie on the flat side, i.e. they flatten
select tones from the home sonority. This flat-side orientation includes the ambiguity
of the Flamenco scale, which can be expressed as having either three flats (EX, GX and
BX) or 2 flats and a sharp (EX, FY and BX), mirroring the ambiguous status of the
flattened fifth or raised fourth in blues practice. Considering ‘Flamenco Sketches’ as
an exploration of local colours within an overall blues sonority based on C also serves
to explain why the initial Cmaj7 sounds as a home chord without the same pull that it
would have in a tonal scheme: the chord on the fifth degree serves equally well as a
final cadence point given the absence of a leading note in the global C Aeolian scale.
‘Blue in Green’
‘Blue in Green’ shares several similarities with ‘Flamenco Sketches’: the tonic scale of
‘Blue in Green’ is again a white note scale (in this case, D Dorian), and the roots of the
harmonies are taken from D Aeolian (D, E, F, G, A, BX, C, D). As on ‘Flamenco
Sketches’, a dominant minor is used and the sense of a tonal centre is equally diffuse.
There is also a similar stratification of texture, with Chambers keeping to roots, Evans
exploring shifting chordal textures in the mid-range, and the front-line players
staying close to single scales.
Part of the reason for the similar musical language on ‘Blue in Green’ lies in
Evans’ voicings, which are not only rich in fourths (as in the sus chords played by
Evans on ‘Flamenco Sketches’), but also make harmonic implications ambiguous. A
striking illustration of this practice is the opening chord on ‘Blue in Green’: as often
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Example 5. Evans’ ambiguous voicing.
happens later in the track, Imin7 is realised as a stack of fourths, topped by a third over
the D sounded by the double bass (see Example 5). Rather than a simple Imin7, what
Evans plays could therefore again be described as a sus chord, which can be heard as
either Dmin13, or Emin9/D or G13/D. Such ambiguity leads to difficulties in describing Evans’ voicings in functional terms; if they are treated as extensions to a diatonic
frame, then the overall harmonic structure would read as in Example 6 (Evans’
voicings).
Although a possible description, the complexity of this sequence is at odds
with the simplicity of the D minor scales used by Davis and Coltrane in their
improvisations. A way of simplifying the description, as well as providing a clue as to
how Evans’ voicings relate to the front-line soloists is to translate these chords into
scales on their roots (see Example 6 – scale pitches and scale names). This sequence is
not only simpler to grasp, but suggests the harmonies in ‘Blue in Green’ serve as scalar
sonorities rather than as triadic harmony.18 The arrangement of these scales follows
a familiar pattern: dominant scales (whether in the form of altered scales or the
Mixolydian) precede main points of rest that outline a simple frame of I–XVI–I–V–I
(see Example 7).
This pattern reflects a simple blues scheme, with a substitution of XVI instead of
IV that is easily understood since they are equivalent scales, and Evans himself
exchanges XVI and IV as the opening chord of the overall cycle (after both of Davis’s
solos). As in ‘Flamenco Sketches’, an open-endedness is then brought to the cycle by
treating I as both the ending point of the cycle and the beginning of a new one.
Even though a sequence loosely related to the blues can be traced in abstract,
the chords following the dominant sevenths are not easily heard as centres. This is
in part due to the irregular metrical distribution, in which these chords occur
respectively on the third, fifth, seventh and ninth bars of the cycle. The opening two
bars of the cycle, however, correspond to the two chords given to Evans by Miles, and
may be considered an external appendix to an otherwise conventional eight-bar
structure of I–IV/XVI–I–V. Heard in this way, ‘Blue in Green’ is a mixture of bluesinspired modality and a richly chromatic diatonic ballad: at the local level, the points
of rest follow a sequence with a loose association to blues practice, and at the global
level individual chord-scales are built on degrees of the Aeolian scale. It is this overall
blues quality that not only links the track to ‘Flamenco Sketches’, but also serves to
explain why the simplified scalar language used by Coltrane and Davis works so
effectively.
‘So What’
‘So What’ is also characterised by Evans’ voicings. The famous ‘So What’ chords can
once again be described as sus chords; in particular, Emin7sus and Dmin7sus (see
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Example 6. Reductions of ‘Blue in Green’.
Example 8). That they are rarely described as such seems to be due to the fact that they
are worked into a call-and-response structure with the bass and that they are so
readily heard as a musical translation of ‘So What’. Yet the bass line serves not only as
a melody, but also to define the modal sonority, establishing D as the tonal centre of a
D Dorian scale by outlining its dominant (A minor) before coming to rest on the D (see
Example 9). The first chord of the ‘So What’ riff extends this sonority, described as
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G Dorian — Aalt. — D Dorian
C Dorian — F mixolydian — BX Lydian
A alt. — D Dorian
E alt.— A Aeolian
D Dorian
IV–V7–I
VII–III7–XVI
V7–I
II7–V
I
Example 7. Modal structure in ‘Blue in Green’.
Example 8. ‘So What’ chords.
Example 9. Implied ‘So What’ harmony.
Emin7sus above, but which might also be described as Amin9sus against the A minor
just outlined by the bass. While ‘So What’ heard horizontally is thus a set of sliding
fourths topped by thirds (or Emin7sus and Dmin7sus), heard vertically the chordal
implication is Amin9sus followed by Dmin7sus. This vertical implication is reinforced
on the second appearance of the bass line, which this time returns to an A that can be
heard to continue underneath the first chord.
The same principle of movement within a static field achieved through sus
chords thus holds for ‘So What’ as for ‘Flamenco Sketches’ and ‘Blue in Green’. Yet the
question of how the two chord-scales on ‘So What’ relate remains – it could be that the
two Dorian scales should be heard simply as adjacent vamps or, following Kernfeld,
the XII relation may be an outgrowth of the ‘chromatic upper neighbour motion’
explored in the fourth segment of ‘Flamenco Sketches’.19 A more substantial link to
‘Flamenco Sketches’ lies in the fact that the two scales reproduce the same pitch sets as
the opening two levels on that track; that is, movement from a scale of no flats to one
of five flats.20 Within this movement two pitches remain stable (C and F), the reason
for which seems to be that these are the only pitches that cannot be flattened from a
white note scale without reproducing notes already in the home scale (CX=B, FX=E).
The scale of 5 flats (BX, EX, AX, DX and GX) might therefore be described as a white
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note scale with the most possible flats introduced (X7, X3, X13, X9 and X5). Understood
in this way, the two chord-scales sound as an extended oscillation within an overall
single static field rather than two separate sonorities whose relation needs to be
explained in structural terms. What is heard most clearly on this track, but has already
been heard on both ‘Flamenco Sketches’ and ‘Blue in Green’, is a horizontal transformation of a soundworld commonly heard vertically in the blues – the introduction of
flattened or ‘blue’ notes against major scale harmony not as vertical, but horizontal
inflections.
II. Modal significance
The significance of the fragmentation and re-orientation of a blues language on Kind of
Blue extends well beyond the note-bound analysis conducted so far. In the suggestive
words of Amiri Baraka, what Davis was seeking to do on this album was to express the
blues ‘not just as form, but as feeling and colour’.21 This aesthetic shift shares broad
similarities with abstract expressionism in its collapsing of hierarchies between foreground and background and in its focus on its own materials of production: as heard
on Kind of Blue, harmony and melody are folded within modal sonorities, and scales
serve not as abstractions from practice but as primary creative tools. Baraka has also
pointed to the social overtones of integration in Kind of Blue within the context of the
mix of identities that he sees as characterising Davis’s musical output. As Baraka says
about Davis’s interracial bands, ‘There is something in the mix that Miles wants to
hear. It might be commercial, to some extent, but it is also social and aesthetic’.22 In
pointing to ‘social and aesthetic’ implications, Baraka directs our attention beyond the
fascination with details of the making of Kind of Blue, explored in much previous
discussion of the album, to the broader political and artistic movements within which
it was situated. In order to listen in to that ‘something in the mix’, careful attention
needs to be paid to the significance of the musical language of Kind of Blue within both
the culture of the late 1950s and that of more recent years.
That modal jazz might symbolise freedom is a familiar trope.23 The reduction in
the number of chords is often said to allow players a freer rein in melodic invention,
releasing them from outlining fast-moving changes with standard formulae, allowing
the possibility of both continuing for as long as desired and creating melodic lines
from any combination of scale degrees. In contrast to this ideal, the practice on Kind of
Blue might seem a peculiarly restrictive version of freedom. Despite Evans’ claim in
the liner notes that the scales on ‘Flamenco Sketches’ are ‘to be played as long as the
soloist wishes’, each soloist chooses standard patterns of four or eight bars. Similarly,
the front-line soloists do not explore a fundamentally new style of melodic improvisation, but keep close to styles that had been explored over the previous decade:
Davis plays ‘within the changes’ creating space through his use of rests and held
notes, Coltrane explores scalar runs and organises his phrasing around goal tones and
short repeated ideas, while Adderley retains his fluid funky style with its strong
rhythmic emphasis and even implies chord progressions within modal areas.24 The
role of the rhythm section is similarly far from free: Chambers and Evans are restricted
by the need to keep close to vamp figurations and Jimmy Cobb offers little in the way
of rhythmic interjections or variations.
It would seem then that questions of musical freedom demand closer attention.
On the basis of the analysis presented here, a different interpretation of the transformation effected by modal jazz may be suggested. The parallel to be made with the
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other arts and society is not so much with release from former structures as with a shift
in organisation from the vertical to the horizontal, or what Jameson termed a new
cultural ‘spatialisation’ and ‘depthlessness’.25 As applied to Kind of Blue, what can be
heard on the album is less an integration of musical styles than a bricolage of elements
drawn from various musical styles: Evans’ voicings derived from classical modernism, Davis’s allusions to the thumb piano and Gospel traditions, Spanish folk music,
the similarities to Indian raga and even Evans’ comparisons in the liner notes to
Japanese art.26 Where there is stylistic transformation is in the language of the
blues, which is aligned with other musical languages by being re-worked into scalar
structures. What musical integration there is on Kind of Blue is therefore achieved only
in the abstract, i.e. modal scales are shared by the multiple stylistic idioms used
without these stylistic idioms themselves becoming in any way unified. Rather than
serving as a symbol of concrete integrations, the musical language of the album would
seem to provide an image of co-existence whose only shared point of reference is the
blues.
Heard in this way, it is worth considering how far the spectacular commercial
success of the album, especially in the last decade, masks an ongoing failure of social
integration to achieve its stated aims. As George Lipsitz has recently observed, despite
the legislative advances of the civil rights movement, discriminatory segregation
continued in practice through urban renewal programs, which created EuropeanAmerican suburbs with vastly higher rates of government investment than the inner
cities inhabited by minority racial groups. These discriminatory policies in housing
lead in turn to marked inequalities in employment and education, continuing what
Lipsitz calls a ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ that has characterised ongoing
discrimination in favour of European-Americans.27 The reception of Kind of Blue has
arguably echoed the same tension between social idealism and material reality. On the
one hand, the musical language of Kind of Blue provides a utopian vision specific to the
late 1950s and early 1960s; a moment of hope in the possibility of integration of
traditions of high and low, classical and vernacular, black and white. On the other
hand, the album ideally meets the demands of a rapidly expanding market with its
need to appeal to the widest possible audience using the minimum of means. The
danger that this dual operation represents is that the ultimate failure of the integrationist movement, as witnessed by the rise of black nationalism from the mid-1960s
onwards and the persistence of economic inequalities up to the present day, is
concealed by the opportunity afforded the individual consumer to buy into the
dream-like image of integration afforded by the co-existence of European-American
and African-American musicians and musical traditions.
Such a dual economy would accord with the position of the blues in the thinking
of the most prominent writer on African-American culture today. For Houston Baker,
the blues is not simply a genre, but ‘a matrix’ that is ‘an enabling script in which
African-American cultural discourse is inscribed’.28 Furthermore, according to Baker,
cultural pluralism failed and continues to fail precisely over the blues, its vernacular,
folk and mass status separating it from the educated, wealthy and literate selfdefinition of America. The blues remain to the dominant culture what earlier integrationists such as Richard Wright termed a ‘form of things unknown’,29 an
‘unknowable’ status that is as much epistemological as social. As Baker says, ‘The
metaphysical privileging of AMERICA by Integrationist Poetics renders the vernacular, in the governing terms of the poetics themselves, an aporia – a self-engendered
paradox’.30 In other words, the promotion of a utopian vision of integration in forms
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of high rhetoric simultaneously served to obscure and place out of mind everyday
reality and its characteristic modes of expression, including most notably the blues.
Kind Of Blue is clearly not what Baker would term the blues, yet in so far as the
album aligns blues idioms with European-American musical languages, it reflects the
ideals of integrationist poetics and is open to the same criticisms. Most notably,
although the blues is a shared point of reference, it is not a common language: straight
blues playing was off-limits to Evans, the one European-American musician on the
album (the piano chair was taken by Wynton Kelly for ‘Freddie Freeloader’). In so far
as social relations are played out on the album, Kind of Blue stands not so much for
integration as a shift in the status of the blues: the blues in its most straightforward
form remains a preserve of African-Americans, but a soft-hued modal blues is presented as a music for all America. Yet the more the blues language is transformed so
that it can align multiple musical styles, the more it recedes from view to be sensed
without being explicitly recognised. The dangers inherent in this approach are readily
apparent: the blues becomes, as in rock and roll, a property to be enjoyed by
European-Americans, whilst simultaneously concealing African-American identity
from view.
In attributing Kind of Blue’s popular success to a broad-based EuropeanAmerican enthusiasm for the blues from the mid-late 1950s onward, a simultaneous
African-American interest in and reception of the blues cannot be overlooked. The
perception of the blues as an essentially African-American genre was one shared, and
in its own way appropriated, by many northern, urban, educated African-Americans:
as expressed most forcibly by Baraka, the blues were symptomatic of the ‘Negro
experience’ in America.31 Yet this vision is as romantic as that entertained by many
European-Americans in its portrayal of a primitive rural tradition of the blues,
untainted by commerce and direct in its expression of personal feelings that spoke for
all conditions of African-Americans.32 What is overlooked in this romanticisation of
the blues is a recognition of its status as a mass-recorded entertainment form that,
although practised mainly by African-Americans, had long been enjoyed and practised by European-Americans.33 Kind of Blue arguably stands squarely within this
pluralistic and openly commercial tradition, drawing on a multiplicity of styles and in
so doing maintaining a syncretic tradition at the very moment that others were
attempting to restrict it to musical or racial essentials. Although the popular success of
the album is due to the way in which it transforms the blues from musical outsider to
invisible insider, there remains hope that in recognising the blues content of the album
its ongoing popularity may be both embraced as a sign of its artistic success and
further reflected upon for what it tells of a failure to remove the need for such an
other-worldly image of harmonious integration.34
Copyright acknowledgements
Permission has been obtained from Capitol Jazz and Classics and from Sony Music for
the publication of transcriptions from all three albums listed in the text.
Endnotes
1. These estimated sales figures were provided by
Sony UK in a private correspondence dated 12
December 2002.
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2. On the freedom of the soloists in ‘Flamenco
Sketches’, see below. Evans’ claim that ‘Miles
conceived these settings only hours before the
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198
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Samuel Barrett
recording dates’ and that ‘without exception the
first complete performance of each was one
‘‘take’’ ’ has been shown to be erroneous
by Kahn, who also draws attention to Evans’
exaggeration about the care needed with parchment in Japanese visual art: see Kahn (2000,
pp. 96, 154).
The two scales usually cited for the title track of
Milestones are G Dorian for the A section and A
Aeolian for the B section. For Mark Gridley, ‘All
Blues’ was ‘a continuation of the modal interest
Davis had shown on the title track of Milestones’
(Gridley 1978, p. 182). For Bob Belden, the title
track of Milestones was ‘the first recording of
Davis’s new direction’ (Belden 2000, p. 395).
‘Many blacks felt that since I had the top small
group in jazz and was paying the most money
that I should have a black piano player [. . .]
Then a lot of people were saying he [Bill Evans]
didn’t play fast enough and hard enough for
them, that he was too delicate’ (Davis 1989,
p. 221).
On the translation of blues idioms into rock and
roll, see Middleton (1972, pp. 148–61), Hatch
and Millward (1987, pp. 68–86) and Headlam
(2002, pp. 158–66). The relation of rhythm and
blues and soul music to the development of
black consciousness is explored at length in
Ward (1998).
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, a sociological study funded by the Carnegie Corporation in 1935 that was first published in 1944,
presented arguments for integration (see Rose
1964). The book was immediately criticised
by Ralph Ellison for its equation of American
culture with white culture (Ellison 1973).
For a full account of the development of the
non-violent and integrationist ideology of the
civil rights movement by Martin Luther King
during the 1950s, see Branch (1988, pp. 69–271).
Gridley (1978, p. 182).
Jost (1975, p. 21).
Tirro (1993, p. 361).
Collier (1978, pp. 432–3).
Jost gives G Aeolian as the scale for the last
segment, and A flat Ionian as the scale for the
second (Jost 1975, p. 22). G Aeolian and A flat
Mixolydian are given for the same segments in
Kerschbaumer (1978, p. 92).
Kahn (2000, p. 70).
Since the overall aim of the fourth segment
was to produce a Flamenco-like sonority,
Adderley’s scale does not contradict Miles
Davis’s superimposed Phrygian. The Phrygian
is itself a typical scale type in Flamenco, and
adding Davis’s Phrygian colouration to the
extra C sharps and E naturals added by John
Coltrane and Adderley results in a bi-modal
scale also commonly used in Flamenco, i.e. D,
EX, E, F, FY, G, A, BX, C, CY. On scales used in
Flamenco, see Katz (2004).
Kernfeld (1981, pp. 137–44).
Evans plays alternating chords underneath the
soloists on the first four segments: Cmajor7/
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17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
Gsus at the first, AX7/EXsus at the second,
BXmajor7/Fsus at the third and Dmajor/
EXmajor at the fourth.
Eric Clapton’s recordings of ‘Layla’, ‘Old Love’,
‘Bad Love’, ‘Miss You’ and ‘Cocaine’, for
example, all feature Aeolian sequences using
chords built on XVII and XVI. Most notably, the
chorus of ‘Layla’ switches between Im, XVI and
XVII (D minor, BX major and C major). For
further examples of Aeolian structures in rock
music, see Middleton (1990, pp. 198–200). Middleton also cites an unpublished paper: A.
Björnberg, ‘On Aeolian harmony in contemporary popular music’, paper presented to the
Third International Conference of IASPM,
Montreal.
D Dorian functions as I, F Mixolydian as XIII, G
Dorian as IV, A Aeolian as V, BX Lydian as XVI,
and C Dorian as XVII.
Kernfeld (1981, p. 157).
This shift is anticipated in Evans’ recording
of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’
(Riverside, 15 December 1958). As often noted,
the chords used in the first segment of
‘Flamenco Sketches’ (Cmaj7–G7sus) derive
from the opening of the Bernstein tune. What
has remained unnoticed is that the chords of the
second segment in ‘Flamenco Sketches’ are also
found in the same tune. Bernstein’s tune
switches at the middle eight to XVI, which is
treated, as in ‘Flamenco Sketches’, in alternation
with a suspended fourth chord on its own dominant, i.e. XVI–XIIIsus (or AXmaj7–EX7sus).
When Evans improvised on ‘Some Other Time’,
he extended the opening two chords over the
whole of the first sixteen bars before switching
to XVI7–XIII7sus, anticipating exactly the opening sequence of chords used in ‘Flamenco
Sketches’.
Baraka (1987, p. 303).
Baraka (1987, p. 294). On the mix of identities
in Davis’s work, see also Tomlinson (1992,
pp. 79–93).
See, most recently, Monson (1998, pp. 149–68).
Adderley frequently implies IImin–V–I progressions over the bar line (e.g. bars 1–2, 3–4 and
5–6 at the opening of his solo).
A new cultural ‘spatialisation’, which can be
traced back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, is
central to Jameson’s reading of postmodernism:
see Jameson (1991, pp. 1–54).
On Evans’ derivation of voicings from early
twentieth-century Spanish composers and
French Impressionists, see Mehegan (1965,
pp. 16–17). For the sources of Davis’s modal
inspirations, see Davis (1989, pp. 224–5).
Lipsitz (1998).
Baker (1984, p. 3).
Baker’s reference is to Wright (1964,
pp. 69–105).
Baker (1984, p. 69).
Baraka 1963, passim but especially ch. 6
(‘Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz’).
The criticism that Baraka locates the authenticity and authority of the blues in simplistic
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Kind of Blue
categories of class and colour is most fully
explored in the review of Blues People by Ralph
Ellison (Ellison 1967, pp. 247–58). On parallel
constructions of the blues by EuropeanAmericans in the country blues revival, see
Titon (1993, pp. 220–40).
33. ‘White’ contributions to the blues have been
stressed by several writers: see especially Bane
(1982) and Cook (1973). For the suggestion that,
199
although rooted in traditions of the rural black
south, the blues was fundamentally shaped by
‘white-black’ interaction in an urban context
and mediated by recordings, see, with further
references, Keil (1991, pp. 232–4).
34. My sincere thanks are extended to Jim Barrett,
Roger Parker and the two anonymous readers
of this journal for invaluable advice in the
preparation and revision of this article.
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Discography
Art Blakey, Moanin’. Blue Note BN 4003
Miles Davis, Milestones. Columbia CL 1193
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Columbia CL 1355
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